The Christian Self, Part I - Individuality, Identity, Submission

The mp3 of this lesson is available at www.cumcsl.org/axiomlessons. If you want to hear the lessons in person, join us on Sundays at 9:45 am in Room 312 at Christ United Methodist Church in Sugar Land, Texas.

5.
In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while
remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.
Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so
made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never
properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And
when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive
idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a
person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we
have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it
because if fits in so well with all the things we know already.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

7.
…the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut
off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. We
come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all
modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a
sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually
rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to
orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred,
because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there
should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

9.
Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband
is the head of the wife, as Christ is also the head of the church, He Himself
being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also
the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love
your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for
her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of
water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her
glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be
holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as
their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever
hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does
the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man
shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the
two shall become one flesh.
-Ephesians 6:22-31

11.
Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives,
human souls will be ‘absorbed’ into God. But when they try to explain
what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into
God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a
drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the
drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as
ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea how human
souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves—in
fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

17.
Paul: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by
the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve
what God’s will is—His good, pleasing, and perfect will.”
-Romans 12:2
Christ: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but
because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,
because of this the world hates you.”
-John 15:19

23.
If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up
his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will
lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what
does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits
himself?
-Luke 9:23-27

24.
Take the case of courage…It means a strong desire to live taking
the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same
shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a
piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers…This paradox
is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal
courage. A man cut off by the sea my save his life if he will risk it on
the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually
stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is
to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a
strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life,
for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not
merely wait for death, for then he will be a coward and will not
escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he
must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy